This proved to be another
excellent concert in the Jerusalem Quartet’s twentieth-anniversary
celebrations. The final quartet from Beethoven’s op.18 set opened in immaculate,
fizzing post-Haydn and post-Mozart
style, judging so well the debts to both composers, as well as the undeniable
originality of their challenger. The first movement’s exposition was possessed
of great energy, its ‘repeat’ – something of a misnomer in a properly dynamic
performance such as this – still more so. The second group thus sounded (both
times) all the more contrasted, especially melting the second time around.
Announcing the development’s opening phrase with Beethovenian brusqueness, the
players nevertheless acknowledged once again the composer’s inheritance from
Haydn – who, after all, could be a little terse himself – in several respects,
not least motivic working. The recapitulation’s concision was striking; so was
the reality that everything, even when, especially when, it seemed the same,
had changed. The slow movement was as serene, as disturbing, as full of mystery
as its counterpart in, say, a Mozart piano concerto, never more so than when it
moved into the minor mode. This was, initially, the Beethoven of the operatic scena, a quality captured to near
perfection here. With the return to the tonic, however, invention and joy were
as ‘purely’ instrumental as one might imagine. Syncopations were relished in
all their generative glory in the scherzo. The trio likewise hit just the right
note: trying to relax, yet never quite being able to do so.

‘La Malincolia’ is Beethoven’s
marking for the Adagio introduction
to the finale. Its indubitably melancholic fragility looked forward, without
exaggeration, to the world of the late quartets, not least in the rarity of the
air it breathed. The passion characterising the music that ensued, in the Allegretto quasi Allegro, had an almost
Schubertian quality to it, punctuated by the fondest of glances back to the music
of Beethoven’s eighteenth-century precursors. Insistence, subtly marked out in performance,
left one in no doubt that this was Beethoven. Likewise the musical
interruptions, the strange turns the music took: perhaps born of, yet never
reducible to, the example of Haydn. The players left one in no doubt of their
consummate command of idiom and, dare I suggest, meaning.

Bartók has as good a claim as
any to be the greatest of all successors to Beethoven in this genre. It would,
at any rate, have been impossible to dissent from such a view in the light of
this performance. The Prima parte of
the Third Quartet opened in properly disconcerting fashion, at least for a few
bars or so, followed by a slight thaw, followed by a glance back, or an
intensification: so the music’s multiple dialectics began to develop. Lest that
sound unduly abstract – I am not sure one can be unduly abstract in this of all
Bartók’s quartets, but anyway – there was genuine anger to be heard too, then
withdrawal. This was Bartók at his most radical, his greatest. Concision and
mood swings suggested Beethoven’s example – perhaps even something of Webern
too, although most likely qualities in common rather than ‘influence’. There
was certainly no denying that every note counted: in itself, horizontally, and
vertically.

The Seconda parte, quite properly, both emerged from and announced its
difference from what had gone before. Something akin to tonality advanced a
claim, all the more touching for the combination of strength of assertion and
equivocal success. What could be more Beethovenian than the protean dynamism we
heard here? The so-called Ricapitulazione
della prima parte and Coda proved
both questing and questioning, with a sadness all their own. Glassy, febrile
passages almost suggested Ligeti, and yet they were thoroughly integrated with
neo-Lisztian transformation of the ‘Hungarian’: another description that raises
more questions than it answers. What music this is!

Sharon Kam joined the players
for the Brahms Clarinet Quintet in the second half. The two violins of Alexander
Pavlovksy and Sergei Bresler immediately announced a different world, of
Viennese sweetness, melancholy, and melancholy in sweetness, with all the
painful lateness and distance that are Brahms’s own. That distance was
intensified by the entries of the other players, not least the parallel or
successor announcement of what might be at stake by Ori Kam and Kyril
Zlotnikov, on viola and cello. Kam entered, seemingly more a mediator than a ‘soloist’,
or rather no ‘mere’ soloist. The motivic complexity of Brahms’s writing is
inescapable here. (Why should anyone wish to escape it?) So too, however, was
its good-natured quality – still, perhaps, grasping Mozart’s mantle. On the other
hand, there were times when we sounded but a stone’s throw from Verklärte Nacht. There were to come some
exquisite, yes soloistic, whisperings from the clarinet, especially in the
development section of this first movement, whose optimistic exhaustion, if I
may call it that, put me in mind of Mendelssohn. The recapitulation sounded more
autumnal, yet also more intense, not least motivically: such is the dynamism of
form, of developing variation. A well-nigh Beethovenian climax truly surprised
and truly fulfilled, after which the players sang with the truest of
melancholy.

The Adagio sounded ‘later’ still, which I think it probably is. Its
exhaustion was nevertheless the setting for rare solo gems indeed (not just from
the clarinet, by any means), in which ghosts of the Viennese past were to be
encountered, even welcomed. Nevertheless, it was the clarinet which, rightly,
emerged as first among equals, Kam’s arabesques both free and yet laden down
with the accumulated weight of tradition that Brahms felt so keenly. Post-Beethovenian
serenity vied with anticipations of Schoenberg: layer upon layer. The third
movement, by way of relative contast, sounded summery (if still ‘late’ summery).
Motivic integrity and fascination remained as great as ever; there was nothing comfortable
to what we heard, underlying agitation suggestive again both of Beethoven and
of Schoenberg. The finale sounded wonderfully ambivalent, ambiguous. Once more,
every note counted, just as it had in the Bartók Quartet, but the sense of
tragedy here was almost Mozartian, all the more poignant for knowing that it
never quite would or could be.